Steven Spielberg to ruin Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon movie

It’s all but gospel now that Stanley Kubrick once conceived a perfect movie called AI, but died before he could make it, at which point Steven Spielberg took over and added an ending that was just him raining a warm piss stream on Kubrick’s dead face. Hey, that’s what people say. Well now, Spielberg tells French TV that he’s taken over another Kubrick project, working with Kubrick’s family on Kubrick’s famously ambitious but never executed screenplay about Napoleon, of which Kubrick once said “I expect to make the best movie ever made.” Interestingly, Spielberg plans to do it as a miniseries. Say what you will about AI, if this is half as good as Band of Brothers, I will watch until my eyes bleed.

Kubrick wrote the script in 1961 but ultimately abandoned the Napoleon biopic in the ’70s because of budget and production challenges. The late filmmaker is famed for his obsessive perfectionism, so his estate should find comfort working in the able hands of Spielberg. [THR]

Kubrick’s Napoleon project was so well-known that it even inspired an 1100-page coffee table book called “The Greatest Movie Never Made.” Impressive, considering a script is only about a hundred pages. ThePlaylist offers their cliff’s notes:

Originally proposed as his next project after “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Kubrick pitched the movie as a $5 million production (roughly $100 million in today’s dollars) with extraordinarily ambitious plans that included upwards of 30,000 men as extras for the battle scenes (remember, this was before CGI) as well as utilizing front projection techniques that he had recently used on ‘2001.’

The research was extensive and meticulous, with Kubrick using Felix Markham’s 1966 biography as a launching pad for his in-depth study that eventually grew to include extensive index cards kept on everyone in Napoleon’s life, and cross referenced to an exacting degree.

MGM had initially greenlit the movie, and United Artists were offered the project, but both grew wary after similar epics like “War & Peace” and “Waterloo” struggled financially.

Kubrick once contracted Anthony Burgess, who wrote A Clockwork Orange (the novel) to write a novel which would become the basis for his Napoleon movie. Kubrick rejected Burgess’s work, saying “Despite its considerable accomplishments, it does not, in my view, help solve either of the two major problems: that of considerably editing the events (and possibly restructuring the time sequence) so as to make a good story, without trivializing history or character, nor does it provide much realistic dialogue, unburdened with easily noticeable exposition or historical fact.” Burgess published the book anyway, Napoleon’s Symphony.

Meanwhile, I’m told, Spielberg has found a novel way to approach the material, in that he plans to tell the entire story from the perspective of Napoleon’s horse. I’d actually be most interested in the period of Napoleon’s life when he was exiled on Saint Helena way the hell out in the middle of the South Atlantic. But as long as they cover the day he spent at Raging Waters I’ll be happy.

Sorry to get pissy on a site for yuk-yuks, but it is _not_ “gospel” that Spielberg ruined A.I. As far as I’m concerned, if you actually pay attention to what’s happening at the end, you have an incredibly dark, pessimistic story about all of humanity destroying itself through self-indulgence until all that’s left is a simulation programmed to ‘love’ another simulation. It’s a Spielberg movie that says that all human emotion and sentimentality is programmed behavior designed for biological survival. Pretty Kubrickian, I’d say, but since the lighting is softer and John Williams did the music instead of Penderecki, people have a hard time processing it.

I was recently on the set of a new production of “Napoleon.” This version is being directed by Ernie Tarte, and he claims to base it on Kubrick’s original idea. I’ve been in contact with Mr. Tarte since the news surfaced of Spielberg’s production. Needless to say, he’s not pleased and is even threatening legal action. My visit to the set of “Napoleon” can be found in my latest podcast ([tiny.cc]). Mr. Tarte’s response to Steven Spielberg can be found here: ([tiny.cc]).

Can’t find it now, but there’s a great article about a visit to the Kubrick’s library, wherein the writer had a “Shining” moment when he realized that the shelves of the room he was in contained nothing but books about Napoleon. Also, Kubrick had a set of filed index cards, one for each day of Napoleon’s life, saying what Napoleon was up to that day. You can see why he hardly ever got anything done toward the end.